See Tobler’s Bibliographia geographica Palaestinae (Leipz. 1867) and
the supplementary lists of more recent works by Ph. Wolff in the
"Jahrbücher für deutsche Theologie, " 1868 and
1872, and by Socin in the "Zeitschrift des deutschen
Palaestina-Vereins," 1878, p. 40, etc.

II. The "Histories of New Testament Times" (Neutestamentliche Zeitgeschichte, a special
department of historical theology recently introduced), by
Schneckburger (1862), Hausrath (1868 sqq.), and Schürer
(1874).

See Lit. in § 8, p. 56.

There is a wonderful harmony between the life of our
Lord as described by the Evangelists, and his geographical and
historical environment as known to us from contemporary writers, and
illustrated and confirmed by modern discovery and research. This
harmony contributes not a little to the credibility of the gospel
history. The more we come to understand the age and country in which
Jesus lived, the more we feel, in reading the Gospels, that we are
treading on the solid ground of real history illuminated by the highest
revelation from heaven. The poetry of the canonical Gospels, if we may
so call their prose, which in spiritual beauty excels all poetry, is
not (like that of the Apocryphal Gospels) the poetry of human
fiction—"no fable old, no mythic lore, nor dream of
bards and seers;" it is the poetry of revealed truth, the poetry of the
sublimest facts the poetry of the infinite wisdom and love of God
which, ever before had entered the imagination of man, but which
assumed human flesh and blood in Jesus of Nazareth and solved through
his life and work the deepest problem of our existence.

The stationary character of Oriental countries and
peoples enables us to infer from their present aspect and condition
what they were two thousand years ago. And in this we are aided by the
multiplying discoveries which make even stones and mummies eloquent
witnesses of the past. Monumental evidence appeals to the senses and
overrules the critical conjectures and combinations of unbelieving
skepticism, however ingenious and acute they may be. Who will doubt the
history of the Pharaohs when it can be read in the pyramids and
sphinxes, in the ruins of temples and rock-tombs, in hieroglyphic
inscriptions and papyrus rolls which antedate the founding of Rome and
the exodus of Moses and the Israelites? Who will deny the biblical
records of Babylon and Nineveh after these cities have risen from the
grave of centuries to tell their own story through cuneiform
inscriptions, eagle-winged lions and human-headed bulls, ruins of
temples and palaces disentombed from beneath the earth? We might as
well erase Palestine from the map and remove it to fairy-land, as to
blot out the Old and New Testament from history and resolve them into
airy myths and legends.162162 Well says Hausrath (Preface to
2nd ed. of vol. I. p. ix) against the mythical theory: "Für die poëtische Welt der
religiösen Sage ist innerhalb einer rein historischen
Darstellung kein Raum; ihre Gebilde verbleichen vor einem geschichtlich
hellen Hintergrund .... Wenn wir die heilige Geschichte als
Bruchstück einer allgemeinen Geschichte nachweisen und
zeigen können, wie die Ränder passen, wenn wir
die abgerissenen Fäden, die sie mit der profanen Welt
verbanden, wieder aufzufinden vermögen, dann ist die Meinung
ausgeschlossen, diese Geschichte sei der schöne Traum eines
späteren Geschlechtes gewesen."

The Land.

Jesus spent his life in Palestine. It is a country
of about the size of Maryland, smaller than Switzerland, and not half
as large as Scotland,163163 The average length of Palestine
is 150 miles, the average breadth east and west of the Jordan to the
Mediterranean, from 80 to 90 miles, the number of square miles from
12,000 to 13,000. The State of Maryland has 11,124, Switzerland 15,992,
Scotland 30,695 English square miles. but favored with a healthy climate, beautiful
scenery, and great variety and fertility of soil, capable of producing
fruits of all lands from the snowy north to the tropical south;
isolated from other countries by desert, mountain and sea, yet lying in
the centre of the three continents of the eastern hemisphere and
bordering on the Mediterranean highway of the historic nations of
antiquity, and therefore providentially adapted to develop not only the
particularism of Judaism, but also the universalism of Christianity.
From little Phoenicia the world has derived the alphabet, from little
Greece philosophy and art, from little Palestine the best of
all—the true religion and the cosmopolitan Bible.
Jesus could not have been born at any other time than in the reign of
Caesar Augustus, after the Jewish religion, the Greek civilization, and
the Roman government had reached their maturity; nor in any other land
than Palestine, the classical soil of revelation, nor among any other
people than the Jews, who were predestinated and educated for centuries
to prepare the way for the coming of the Messiah and the fulfilment of
the law and the prophets. In his infancy, a fugitive from the wrath of
Herod, He passed through the Desert (probably by the short route along
the Mediterranean coast) to Egypt and back again; and often may his
mother have spoken to him of their brief sojourn in "the land of
bondage," out of which Jehovah had led his people, by the mighty arm of
Moses, across the Red Sea and through "the great and terrible
wilderness" into the land of promise. During his forty days of fasting
"in the wilderness" he was, perhaps, on Mount Sinai communing with the
spirits of Moses and Elijah, and preparing himself in the awfully
eloquent silence of that region for the personal conflict with the
Tempter of the human race, and for the new legislation of liberty from
the Mount of Beatitudes.164164 The tradition, which locates
the Temptation on the barren and dreary mount Quarantania, a few miles
northwest of Jericho, is of late date. Paul also probably went, after
his conversion, as far as Mount Sinai during the three years of repose
and preparation "in Arabia,"Gal. 1:17, comp. 4:24. Thus the three lands of the Bible, Egypt, the
cradle of Israel, the Desert, its school and playground, and Canaan,
its final home, were touched and consecrated by "those blessed feet
which, eighteen centuries ago, were nailed for our advantage on
the bitter cross."

He travelled on his mission of love through
Judaea, Samaria, Galilee, and Peraea; he came as far north as mount
Hermon, and once he crossed beyond the land of Israel to the Phoenician
border and healed the demonized daughter of that heathen mother to whom
he said, "O woman, great is thy faith: be it done unto thee even as
thou wilt."

We can easily follow him from place to place, on
foot or on horseback, twenty or thirty miles a day, over green fields
and barren rocks over hill and dale among flowers and thistles, under
olive and fig-trees, pitching our tent for the night’s
rest, ignoring the comforts of modern civilization, but delighting in
the unfading beauties of God’s nature, reminded at
every step of his wonderful dealings with his people, and singing the
psalms of his servants of old.

We may kneel at his manger in Bethlehem, the town
of Judaea where Jacob buried his beloved Rachel, and a pillar, now a
white mosque, marks her grave; where Ruth was rewarded for her filial
devotion, and children may still be seen gleaning after the reapers in
the grainfields, as she did in the field of Boaz; where his ancestor,
the poet-king, was born and called from his father’s
flocks to the throne of Israel; where shepherds are still watching the
sheep as in that solemn night when the angelic host thrilled their
hearts with the heavenly anthem of glory to God, and peace on earth to
men of his good pleasure; where the sages from the far East offered
their sacrifices in the name of future generations of heathen converts;
where Christian gratitude has erected the oldest church in Christendom,
the "Church of the Nativity," and inscribed on the solid rock in the
"Holy Crypt," in letters of silver, the simple but pregnant
inscription: "Hic
de Virgine Maria Jesus Christus natus est." When all the surroundings correspond
with the Scripture narrative, it is of small account whether the
traditional grotto of the Nativity is the identical
spot—though pointed out as such it would seem already
in the middle of the second century.165165 W. Hepworth Dixon (The Holy
Land, ch. 14) ingeniously pleads for the traditional cave, and the
identity of the inn of the Nativity with the patrimony of Boaz and the
home of David.

We accompany him in a three days’
journey from Bethlehem to Nazareth, his proper home, where he spent
thirty silent years of his life in quiet preparation for his public
work, unknown in his divine character to his neighbors and even the
members of his own household (John 7:5), except his saintly parents.
Nazareth is still there, a secluded, but charmingly located mountain
village, with narrow, crooked and dirty streets, with primitive stone
houses where men, donkeys and camels are huddled together, surrounded
by cactus hedges and fruitful gardens of vines, olive, fig, and
pomegranates, and favorably distinguished from the wretched villages of
modern Palestine by comparative industry, thrift, and female beauty;
the never failing "Virgin’s Fountain," whither Jesus
must often have accompanied his mother for the daily supply of water,
is still there near the Greek Church of the Annunciation, and is the
evening rendezvous of the women and maidens, with their water-jars
gracefully poised on the head or shoulder, and a row of silver coins
adorning their forehead; and behind the village still rises the hill,
fragrant with heather and thyme, from which he may often have cast his
eye eastward to Gilboa, where Jonathan fell, and to the graceful,
cone-like Tabor—the Righi of
Palestine—northward to the lofty Mount
Hermon—the Mont Blanc of
Palestine—southward to the fertile plain of
Esdraëlon—the classic battle-ground of
Israel—and westward to the ridge of Carmel, the coast
of Tyre and Sidon and the blue waters of the Mediterranean
sea—the future highway of his gospel of peace to
mankind. There he could feast upon the rich memories of David and
Jonathan, Elijah and Elisha, and gather images of beauty for his
lessons of wisdom. We can afford to smile at the silly superstition
which points out the kitchen of the Virgin Mary beneath the Latin
Church of the Annunciation, the suspended column where she received the
angel’s message, the carpenter shop of Joseph and
Jesus, the synagogue in which he preached on the acceptable year of the
Lord, the stone table at which he ate with his disciples, the Mount of
Precipitation two miles off, and the stupendous monstrosity of the
removal of the dwelling-house of Mary by angels in the air across the
sea to Loretto in Italy! These are childish fables, in striking
contrast with the modest silence of the Gospels, and neutralized by the
rival traditions of Greek and Latin monks; but nature in its beauty is
still the same as Jesus saw and interpreted it in his incomparable
parables, which point from nature to nature’s God and
from visible symbols to eternal truths.166166 We add the vivid description of
Renan (Vie de Jésus, Ch. II. p. 25) from personal
observation: "Nazareth was a small town, situated in a fold of land
broadly open at the summit of the group of mountains which closes on
the north the plain of Esdraëlon. The population is now from
three to four [probably five to six] thousand, and it cannot have
changed very much. It is quite cold in winter and the climate is very
healthy. The town, like all the Jewish villages of the time, was a mass
of dwellings built without style, and must have presented the same poor
and uninteresting appearance as the villages in Semitic countries. The
houses, from all that appears, did not differ much from those cubes of
stone, without interior or exterior elegance, which now cover the
richest portion of the Lebanon, and which, in the midst of vines and
fig-trees, are nevertheless very pleasant. The environs, moreover, are
charming, and no place in the world was so well adapted to dreams of
absolute happiness (nul endroit
du monde ne fut si bien fait pour les rêves de
l’absolu bonheur). Even
in our days, Nazareth is a delightful sojourn, the only place perhaps
in Palestine where the soul feels a little relieved of the burden which
weighs upon it in the midst of this unequalled desolation. The people
are friendly and good-natured; the gardens are fresh and green.
Antonius Martyr, at the end of the sixth century, draws an enchanting
picture of the fertility of the environs, which he compares to
paradise. Some valleys on the western side fully justify his
description. The fountain about which the life and gayety of the little
town formerly centered, has been destroyed; its broken channels now
give but a turbid water. But the beauty of the women who gathered there
at night, this beauty which was already remarked in the sixth century,
and in which was seen the gift of the Virgin Mary, has been
surprisingly well preserved. It is the Syrian type in all its
languishing grace. There is no doubt that Mary was there nearly every
day and took her place, with her urn upon her shoulder, in the same
line with her unremembered countrywomen. Antonius Martyr remarks that
the Jewish women, elsewhere disdainful to Christians, are here full of
affability. Even at this day religious animosities are less intense at
Nazareth than elsewhere." Comp. also the more elaborate description in
Keim, I. 318 sqq., and Tobler’s monograph on Nazareth,
Berlin, 1868.

Jesus was inaugurated into his public ministry by
his baptism in the fast-flowing river Jordan, which connects the Old
and New Covenant. The traditional spot, a few miles from Jericho, is
still visited by thousands of Christian pilgrims from all parts of the
world at the Easter season, who repeat the spectacle of the
multitudinous baptisms of John, when the people came "from Jerusalem
and all Judaea and all the region round about the Jordan" to confess
their sins and to receive his water-baptism of repentance.

The ruins of Jacob’s well still
mark the spot where Jesus sat down weary of travel, but not of his work
of mercy and opened to the poor woman of Samaria the well of the water
of life and instructed her in the true spiritual worship of God; and
the surrounding landscape, Mount Gerizim, and Mount Ebal, the town of
Shechem, the grain-fields whitening to the harvest, all illustrate and
confirm the narrative in the fourth chapter of John; while the fossil
remnant of the Samaritans at Nablous (the modern Shechem) still
perpetuates the memory of the paschal sacrifice according to the Mosaic
prescription, and their traditional hatred of the Jews.

We proceed northward to Galilee where Jesus spent
the most popular part of his public ministry and spoke so many of his
undying words of wisdom and love to the astonished multitudes. That
province was once thickly covered with forests, cultivated fields,
plants and trees of different climes, prosperous villages and an
industrious population.167167 Josephus no doubt greatly
exaggerates when he states that there were no less than two hundred and
four towns and villages in Galilee (Vita, c. 45, διακόσιαι
καὶ
τέσσαρες
κατὰ τὴν
Γαλιλαίαν
εἰσὶ
πόλεις καὶ
κῶμαι), and
that the smallest of those villages contained above fifteen thousand
inhabitants (Bell. Jud. III. 3, 2). This would give us a
population of over three millions for that province alone, while the
present population of all Palestine and Syria scarcely amounts to two
millions, or forty persons to the square mile (according to
Bädeker, Pal. and Syria, 1876, p. 86). The rejection of the Messiah and the Moslem
invasion have long since turned that paradise of nature into a desolate
wilderness, yet could not efface the holy memories and the
illustrations of the gospel history. There is the lake with its clear
blue waters, once whitened with ships sailing from shore to shore, and
the scene of a naval battle between the Romans and the Jews, now
utterly forsaken, but still abounding in fish, and subject to sudden
violent storms, such as the one which Jesus commanded to cease; there
are the hills from which he proclaimed the Sermon on the Mount, the
Magna Charta of his kingdom, and to which he often retired for prayer;
there on the western shore is the plain of Gennesaret, which still
exhibits its natural fertility by the luxuriant growth of briers and
thistles and the bright red magnolias overtopping them; there is the
dirty city of Tiberias, built by Herod Antipas, where Jewish rabbis
still scrupulously search the letter of the Scriptures without finding
Christ in them; a few wretched Moslem huts called Mejdel still indicate
the birth-place of Mary Magdalene, whose penitential tears and
resurrection joys are a precious legacy of Christendom. And although
the cities of Capernaum, Bethsaida and Chorazim, "where most of his
mighty works were done" have utterly disappeared from the face of the
earth, and their very sites are disputed among scholars, thus verifying
to the letter the fearful prophecy of the Son of Man,168168Matt. 11:20-24; Luke
10:13-15. yet the ruins of
Tell Hum and Kerazeh bear their eloquent testimony to the judgment of
God for neglected privileges, and the broken columns and friezes with a
pot of manna at Tell Hum are probably the remains of the very synagogue
which the good Roman centurion built for the people of Capernaum, and
in which Christ delivered his wonderful discourse on the bread of life
from heaven.169169 Comp. Fr. Delitzsch:
Ein Tag in Capernaum, 2d ed. 1873; Furrer: Die Ortschaften am See Genezareth,
in the "Zeitschrift des deutschen Palaestina-Vereins," 1879, pp. 52
sqq.: my article on Capernaum, ibid. 1878, pp. 216 sqq. and in
the "Quarterly Statement of the Palestine Exploration Fund" for July,
1879, pp. 131 sqq., with the observations thereon by Lieut. Kitchener,
who agrees with Dr. Robinson in locating Capernaum Khan Minyeh,
although there are no ruins there at all to be compared with those of
Tell Hum.

Caesarea Philippi, formerly and now called Banias
(or Paneas, Paneion, from the heathen sanctuary of Pan), at the foot of
Hermon, marks the northern termination of the Holy Land and of the
travels of the Lord, and the boundary-line between the Jews and the
Gentiles; and that Swiss-like, picturesque landscape, the most
beautiful in Palestine, in full view of the fresh, gushing source of
the Jordan, and at the foot of the snow-crowned monarch of Syrian
mountains seated on a throne of rock, seems to give additional force to
Peter’s fundamental confession and
Christ’s prophecy of his Church universal built upon
the immovable rock of his eternal divinity.

The closing scenes of the earthly life of our Lord
and the beginning of his heavenly life took place in Jerusalem and the
immediate neighborhood, where every spot calls to mind the most
important events that ever occurred or can occur in this world.
Jerusalem, often besieged and destroyed, and as often rebuilt "on her
own heap," is indeed no more the Jerusalem of Herod, which lies buried
many feet beneath the rubbish and filth of centuries; even the site of
Calvary is disputed, and superstition has sadly disfigured and obscured
the historic associations.170170 The present mongrel population
of Jerusalem—Moslems, Jews, and Christians of all
denominations, though mostly Greek—scarcely exceeds
30,000, while at the time of Christ it must have exceeded 100,000, even
if we make a large deduction from the figures of Josephus, who states
that on a Passover under the governorship of Cestius Gallus 256,500
paschal lambs were slain, and that at the destruction of the City,
a.d. 70, 1,100,000 Jews perished and 97,000
were sold into slavery (including 600,000 strangers who had crowded
into the doomed city). Bell. Jud. vi. 9, 3. "Christ is not there, He is risen."171171Matt. 28:6.
There is no more melancholy sight in the world than the present
Jerusalem as contrasted with its former glory, and with the teeming
life of Western cities; and yet so many are the sacred memories
clustering around it and perfuming the very air, that even Rome must
yield the palm of interest to the city which witnessed the crucifixion
and the resurrection. The Herodian temple on Mount Moriah, once the
gathering place of pious Jews from all the earth, and enriched with
treasures of gold and silver which excited the avarice of the
conquerors, has wholly disappeared, and "not one stone is left upon
another," in literal fulfilment of Christ’s
prophecy;172172Matt. 24:2; Mark 13:2; Luke
19:44. but the massive foundations of
Solomon’s structure around the temple area still bear
the marks of the Phoenician workmen; the "wall of wailing" is moistened
with the tears of the Jews who assemble there every Friday to mourn
over the sins and misfortunes of their forefathers; and if we look down
from Mount Olivet upon Mount Moriah and the Moslem Dome of the Rock,
the city even now presents one of the most imposing, as well as most
profoundly affecting sights on earth. The brook Kedron, which Jesus
crossed in that solemn night after the last Passover, and Gethsemane
with its venerable olive-trees and reminiscences of the agony, and
Mount Olivet from which he rose to heaven, are still there, and behind
it the remnant of Bethany, that home of peace and holy friendship which
sheltered him the last nights before the crucifixion. Standing on that
mountain with its magnificent view, or at the turning point of the road
from Jericho and Bethany, and looking over Mount Moriah and the holy
city, we fully understand why the Saviour wept and exclaimed,
"Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them
that are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children
together even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye
would not! Behold, your house is left unto you desolate!

Thus the Land and the Book illustrate and confirm
each other. The Book is still full of life and omnipresent in the
civilized world; the Land is groaning under the irreformable despotism
of the "unspeakable" Turk, which acts like a blast of the Sirocco from
the desert. Palestine lies under the curse of God. It is at best a
venerable ruin "in all the imploring beauty of decay," yet not without
hope of some future resurrection in God’s own good
time. But in its very desolation it furnishes evidence for the truth of
the Bible. It is "a fifth Gospel," engraven upon rocks.173173 Renan sums up the results of
his personal observations as director of the scientific commission for
the exploration of ancient Phoenicia in 1860 and 1861, in the following
memorable confession (Vie de
Jêsus, Introd. p.
liii.)."J’ai
traversê dans tous les sens la province
évangelique; j’ai visitê
Jérusalem, Hêbron et la Samarie;presque aucune localité importante de
l’histoire de Jésus ne m’a
échappé. Toute cette histoire qui, à
distance, semble flotter dans les nuages d’un monde
sans réalité, prit ainsi un corps, une
solidité qui
m’étonnèrent.
L’accord frappant des textes et des lieux, la
merveilleuse harmonie de l’idéal
évangélique avec le paysage qui lui servit de
cadre furent pour moi comme une révélation.
J’eus devant les yeux un cinquième
évangile, lacéré, mais lisible encore,
et désormais, à travers les
récits de Matthieu et de Marc, au lieu d’un
être abstrait, qu’on dirait
n’avoir jamais existé, je vis une admirable
figure humaine vivre, se mouvoir." His familiarity with the Orient
accounts for the fact that this brilliant writer leaves much more
historical foundation for the gospel history than his
predecessorStrauss, who never saw Palestine.

The People.

Is there a better argument for Christianity than
the Jews? Is there a more patent and a more stubborn fact in history
than that intense and unchangeable Semitic nationality with its equally
intense religiosity? Is it not truly symbolized by the bush in the
desert ever burning and never consumed? Nebuchadnezzar, Antiochus
Epiphanes, Titus, Hadrian exerted their despotic power for the
extermination of the Jews; Hadrian’s edict forbade
circumcision and all the rites of their religion; the intolerance of
Christian rulers treated them for ages with a sort of revengeful
cruelty, as if every Jew were personally responsible for the crime of
the crucifixion. And, behold, the race still lives as tenaciously as
ever, unchanged and unchangeable in its national traits, an omnipresent
power in Christendom. It still produces, in its old age, remarkable men
of commanding influence for good or evil in the commercial, political,
and literary world; we need only recall such names as Spinoza,
Rothschild, Disraeli, Mendelssohn, Heine, Neander. If we read the
accounts of the historians and satirists of imperial Rome about the
Jews in their filthy quarter across the Tiber, we are struck by the
identity of that people with their descendants in the ghettos of modern
Rome, Frankfurt, and New York. Then they excited as much as they do now
the mingled contempt and wonder of the world; they were as remarkable
then for contrasts of intellectual beauty and striking ugliness,
wretched poverty and princely wealth; they liked onions and garlic, and
dealt in old clothes, broken glass, and sulphur matches, but knew how
to push themselves from poverty and filth into wealth and influence;
they were rigid monotheists and scrupulous legalists who would strain
out a gnat and swallow a camel; then as now they were temperate, sober,
industrious, well regulated and affectionate in their domestic
relations and careful for the religious education of their children.
The majority were then, as they are now, carnal descendants of Jacob,
the Supplanter, a small minority spiritual children of Abraham, the
friend of God and father of the faithful. Out of this gifted race have
come, at the time of Jesus and often since, the bitterest foes and the
warmest friends of Christianity.

Among that peculiar people Jesus spent his earthly
life, a Jew of the Jews, yet in the highest sense the Son of Man, the
second Adam, the representative Head and Regenerator of the whole race.
For thirty years of reserve and preparation he hid his divine glory and
restrained his own desire to do good, quietly waiting till the voice of
prophecy after centuries of silence announced, in the wilderness of
Judaea and on the banks of the Jordan, the coming of the kingdom of
God, and startled the conscience of the people with the call to repent.
Then for three years he mingled freely with his countrymen.
Occasionally he met and healed Gentiles also, who were numerous in
Galilee; he praised their faith the like of which he had not found in
Israel, and prophesied that many shall come from the east and the west
and shall sit down with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of
heaven, while the children of the kingdom shall be cast out into outer
darkness.174174Matt. 8:5-13; 15:21-28; Luke
7:1-9. He conversed with a woman of Samaria, to the
surprise of his disciples, on the sublimest theme, and rebuked the
national prejudice of the Jews by holding up a good Samaritan as a
model for imitation.175175John 4:5-42; Luke
10:30-37. It was on the occasion of a visit from some
"Greeks," shortly before the crucifixion, that he uttered the
remarkable prophecy of the universal attraction of his cross.176176John 12:20-32 But these
were exceptions. His mission, before the resurrection, was to the lost
sheep of Israel.177177Matt. 10:5, 6;
15:14.

He associated with all ranks of Jewish society,
attracting the good and repelling the bad, rebuking vice and relieving
misery, but most of his time he spent among the middle classes who
constituted the bone and sinew of the nation, the farmers and
workingmen of Galilee, who are described to us as an industrious, brave
and courageous race, taking the lead in seditious political movements,
and holding out to the last moment in the defence of Jerusalem.178178 Josephus, Bell. Jud.
III. c. 3, § 2: "These two Galilees, of so great largeness,
and encompassed with so many nations of foreigners, have been always
able to make a strong resistance on all occasions of war; for the
Galileans are inured to war from their infancy, and have been always
very numerous; nor hath the country ever been destitute of men of
courage, or wanted a numerous set of them: for their soil is
universally rich and fruitful, and full of the plantations of trees of
all sorts, insomuch that it invites the most slothful to take pains in
its cultivation by its fruitfulness: accordingly it is all cultivated
by its inhabitants, and no part of it lies idle. Moreover, the cities
lie here very thick, and the very many villages there are so full of
people, by richness of their soil, that the very least of them
contained above fifteen thousand inhabitants (?)." At
the same time they were looked upon by the stricter Jews of Judaea as
semi-heathens and semi-barbarians; hence the question, "Can any good
come out of Nazareth, and "Out of Galilee ariseth no prophet."179179John 1:46;.7:52; Matt.
4:16. The Sanhedrists forgot in their blind passion that Jonah
was from Galilee. After the fall of Jerusalem Tiberias became the
headquarters of Hebrew learning and the birthplace of the
Talmud. He
selected his apostles from plain, honest, unsophisticated fishermen who
became fishers of men and teachers of future ages. In Judaea he came in
contact with the religious leaders, and it was proper that he should
close his ministry and establish his church in the capital of the
nation.

He moved among the people as a Rabbi (my Lord) or
a Teacher, and under this name he is usually addressed.180180ῥαββί from ברַ or with the
suff יבִּרַ My
prince, lord, κὐριος) sixteen times in the N. T.,. ῥαββονί
orῥαββουνί
twice; διδάσκαλος
(variously rendered in the E. V. teacher,
doctor, and mostly master) about forty times; ἐπιστάτης(rendered master) six times, καθηγητής
(rendered master) once in Matt. 23:10 (the
text rec. also 10:8, where διδάσκαλος
is the correct reading). Other designations of these
teachers in the N. T. are γραμματεῖς
, νομικοί,
νομοδιδάσκαλοι. Josephus calls them σοφισταί,
ἱερογραμματεῖς,
πατρίων
ἐξηγηταὶ
νόμων–ϊ,
–ͅϊthe Mishna
סימִכחֲ and סירִפְוֹסscholars. See
Schürer, p. 441. The Rabbis
were the intellectual and moral leaders of the nation, theologians,
lawyers, and preachers, the expounders of the law, the keepers of the
conscience, the regulators of the daily life and conduct; they were
classed with Moses and the prophets, and claimed equal reverence. They
stood higher than the priests who owed their position to the accident
of birth, and not to personal merit. They coveted the chief seats in
the synagogues and at feasts; they loved to be greeted in the markets
and to be called of men, "Rabbi, Rabbi." Hence our
Lord’s warning: "Be not ye called
’Rabbi:’ for one is your Master,
even Christ; and all ye are brethren."181181Matt. 23:8; comp. Mark 12:38,
39; Luke 11:43; 20:46. They taught in the
temple, in the synagogue, and in the schoolhouse (Bethhamidrash), and
introduced their pupils, sitting on the floor at their feet, by asking,
and answering questions, into the intricacies of Jewish casuistry. They
accumulated those oral traditions which were afterwards embodied in the
Talmud, that huge repository of Jewish wisdom and folly. They performed
official acts gratuitously.182182 The same, however, was the case
with Greek and Roman teachers before Vespasian, who was the first to
introduce a regular salary. I was told in Cairo that the professors of
the great Mohammedan University likewise teach gratuitously. They derived their support from an
honorable trade or free gifts of their pupils, or they married into
rich families. Rabbi Hillel warned against making gain of the crown (of
the law), but also against excess of labor, saying, "Who is too much
given to trade, will not become wise." In the book of Jesus Son of
Sirach (which was written about 200 b.c.) a
trade is represented as incompatible with the vocation of a student and
teacher,183183Ecclesiasticus 38:24-34: "The
wisdom of a learned man cometh by opportunity of leisure; and he that
hath little business shall become wise. How can he get wisdom that
holdeth the plough," etc. but the prevailing sentiment at the time of
Christ favored a combination of intellectual and physical labor as
beneficial to health and character. One-third of the day should be
given to study one-third to prayer, one third to work. "Love manual
labor," was the motto of Shemaja, a teacher of Hillel. "He who does not
teach his son a trade," said Rabbi Jehuda, "is much the same as if he
taught him to be a robber." "There is no trade," says the Talmud,
"which can be dispensed with; but happy is he who has in his parents
the example of a trade of the more excellent sort."184184 See FR. Delitzsch:
Jüdisches Handwerkerleben zur
Zeit Jesu. Erlangen, third ed. revised,
1879. He states (p. 77) that more than one hundred Rabbis who figure in
the Talmud carried on a trade and were known by it, as R. Oshaja the
shoemaker, R. Abba the tailor, R. Juda the baker, R. Abba Josef the
architect, R. Chana the banker, R. Abba Shaul the grave-digger, R. Abba
Oshaja the fuller, R. Abin the carpenter, etc. He remarks (p. 23): "The
Jews have always been an industrious people and behind no other in
impulse, ability and inventiveness for restless activity; agriculture
and trade were their chief occupations before the dissolution of their
political independence; only in consequence of their dispersion and the
contraction of their energies have they become a people of sharpers and
peddlers and taken the place of the old Phoenicians." But the talent
and disposition for sharp bargains was inherited from their father
Jacob, and turned the temple of God into "a house of merchandise."
Christ charges the Pharisees with avarice which led them to "devour
widows’ houses." Comp. Matt. 23:14; Mark 12:40; Luke
16:14; 20:47.

Jesus himself was not only the son of a carpenter,
but during his youth he worked at that trade himself.185185Mark 6:3 Jesus is called, by
his neighbors, "the carpenter"ὁ
τέκτων),
Matt. 13:55 "the carpenter’s son." When he entered upon
his public ministry the zeal for God’s house claimed
all his time and strength, and his modest wants were more than supplied
by a few grateful disciples from Galilee, so that something was left
for the benefit of the poor.186186Luke 8:3 Matt. 27:55; Mark
15:41; John 13:29. Among the pious women who ministered to Jesus was
also Joanna, the wife of Chuzas, King Herod’s steward.
To her may be traced the vivid circumstantial description of the
dancing scene at Herod’s feast and the execution of
John the Baptist, Mark 6:14-29. St. Paul learned the trade of tentmaking,
which was congenial to his native Cilicia, and derived from it his
support even as an apostle, that he might relieve his congregations and
maintain a noble independence.187187Acts 18:3; 20:33-35; 1 Thess.
2:9; 2 Thess. 3:8; 2 Cor. 11:7-9.

Jesus availed himself of the usual places of
public instruction in the synagogue and the temple, but preached also
out of doors, on the mountain, at the, sea-side, and wherever the
people assembled to hear him. "I have spoken openly to the world; I
ever taught in synagogues and in the temple, where all the Jews come
together; and in secret spake I nothing.188188John 18:20. Comp. Matt. 4:23;
9:35; 21:23; 26:55; Mark 1:21, 39; 14:49; Luke 2:46; 4:14-16, 31, 44;
13:10; 21:37. Paul likewise taught in
the synagogue wherever he had an opportunity on his missionary
journeys.189189Acts 13:14-16; 16:13; 17:2,
3. The familiar mode of teaching was by
disputation, by asking and answering questions on knotty points, of the
law, by parables and sententious sayings, which easily lodged in the
memory; the Rabbi sat on a chair, the pupils stood or sat on the floor
at his feet.190190Luke 2:46; 5:17; Matt. 5:1;
26:55; John 8:2; Acts 22:3 ("at the feet of Gamaliel"). Knowledge of the Law of God was general among
the Jews and considered the most important possession. They remembered
the commandments better than their own name.191191 Josephus often speaks of this.
C. Ap. I. 12: "More than all we are concerned for the education
of our youth (παιδοτροφία), and we consider the keeping of the laws (τὸ
φυλάττειν
τοὺς
νόμους)
and the corresponding piety (τὴν κατὰ
τούτους
παραδεδομένην
εὐσέβειαν) to be the most necessary work of life."Comp. II. 18;
Ant. IV. 8, 12. To the same effect is the testimony of Philo,
Legat. ad Cajum. § 16. 31, quoted by
Schürer, p. 467. Instruction began in
early childhood in the family and was carried on in the school and the
synagogue. Timothy learned the sacred Scriptures on the knees of his
mother and grandmother.192192 2 Tim, 1:5; 3:15; comp. Eph.
6:4. Josephus boasts, at the expense of his
superiors, that when only fourteen years of age he had such an exact
knowledge of the law that he was consulted by the high priest and the
first men of Jerusalem.193193Vita, §
2. Schoolmasters were appointed in every town, and
children were taught to read in their sixth or seventh year, but
writing was probably a rare accomplishment.194194 Schürer, p. 468; and
Ginsburg, art. Education, in Kitto’s "Cyc. of
Bibl. Liter.," 3d ed.

The synagogue was the local, the temple the
national centre of religious and social life; the former on the weekly
Sabbath (and also on Monday and Thursday), the latter on the Passover
and the other annual festivals. Every town had a synagogue, large
cities had many, especially Alexandria and Jerusalem.195195Acts 6:9 for the freedmen and
the Hellenists and proselytes from different countries. Rabbinical
writers estimate the number of synagogues in Jerusalem as high as 480
(i.e. 4 x 10 x 12), which seems incredible. The worship was very
simple: it consisted of prayers, singing, the reading of sections from
the Law and the Prophets in Hebrew, followed by a commentary and homily
in the vernacular Aramaic. There was a certain democratic liberty of
prophesying, especially outside of Jerusalem. Any Jew of age could read
the Scripture lessons and make comments on invitation of the ruler of
the synagogue. This custom suggested to Jesus the most natural way of
opening his public ministry. When he returned from his baptism to
Nazareth, "he entered, as his custom was, into the synagogue on the
Sabbath day, and stood up to read. And there was delivered unto him the
roll of the prophet Isaiah. And he opened the roll and found the place
where it was written (61:1, 2) ’The Spirit of the Lord
is upon me, because he anointed me to preach good tidings to the poor;
he hath sent me to proclaim release to the captives, and recovering of
sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, to
proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.’ And he
closed the book, and gave it back to the attendant, and sat down: and
the eyes of all in the synagogue were fastened on him. And he began to
say unto them, ’To-day hath this scripture been
fulfilled in your ears.’ And all bare witness unto
him, and wondered at the words of grace which proceeded out of his
mouth: and they said, Is not this Joseph’s son?"196196Luke 4:16-22.

On the great festivals he visited from his twelfth
year the capital of the nation where the Jewish religion unfolded all
its splendor and attraction. Large caravans with trains of camels and
asses loaded with provisions and rich offerings to the temple, were set
in motion from the North and the South, the East and the West for the
holy city, "the joy of the whole earth;" and these yearly pilgrimages,
singing the beautiful Pilgrim Psalms (Ps, 120 to 134), contributed
immensely to the preservation and promotion of the common faith, as the
Moslem pilgrimages to Mecca keep up the life of Islam. We may greatly
reduce the enormous figures of Josephus, who on one single Passover
reckoned the number of strangers and residents in Jerusalem at
2,700,000 and the number of slaughtered lambs at 256,500, but there
still remains the fact of the vast extent and solemnity of the
occasion. Even now in her decay, Jerusalem (like other Oriental cities)
presents a striking picturesque appearance at Easter, when Christian
pilgrims from the far West mingle with the many-colored Arabs, Turks,
Greeks, Latins, Spanish and Polish Jews, and crowd to suffocation the
Church of the Holy Sepulchre. How much more grand and dazzling must
this cosmopolitan spectacle have been when the priests (whose number
Josephus estimates at 20,000) with the broidered tunic, the fine linen
girdle, the showy turban, the high priests with the ephod of blue and
purple and scarlet, the breastplate and the mitre, the Levites with
their pointed caps, the Pharisees with their broad phylacteries and
fringes, the Essenes in white dresses and with prophetic mien, Roman
soldiers with proud bearing, Herodian courtiers in oriental pomposity,
contrasted with beggars and cripples in rags, when pilgrims
innumerable, Jews and proselytes from all parts of the empire,
"Parthians and Medes and Elamites and the dwellers in Mesopotamia, in
Judaea and Cappadocia, in Pontus and Asia, in Phrygia and Pamphylia, in
Egypt and parts of Libya about Cyrene, and sojourners from Rome, both
Jews and proselytes, Cretans, and Arabians,"197197Acts 2:8-12. all wearing their
national costume and speaking a Babel of tongues, surged through the
streets, and pressed up to Mount Moriah where "the glorious temple
rear’d her pile, far off appearing like a mount of
alabaster, topp’d with golden spires" and where on the
fourteenth day of the first month columns of sacrificial smoke arose
from tens of thousands of paschal lambs, in historical commemoration of
the great deliverance from the land of bondage, and in typical
prefiguration of the still greater redemption from the slavery of sin
and death.198198 Comp. the description of King
Josiah’s Passover, 2 Chr. 35:1-19.

To the outside observer the Jews at that time were
the most religious people on earth, and in some sense this is true.
Never was a nation so ruled by the written law of God; never did a
nation so carefully and scrupulously study its sacred books, and pay
greater reverence to its priests and teachers. The leaders of the
nation looked with horror and contempt upon the unclean, uncircumcised
Gentiles, and confirmed the people in their spiritual pride and
conceit. No wonder that the Romans charged the Jews with the odium generis
humani.

Yet, after all, this intense religiosity was but a
shadow of true religion. It was a praying corpse rather than a living
body. Alas! the Christian Church in some ages and sections presents a
similar sad spectacle of the deceptive form of godliness without its
power. The rabbinical learning and piety bore the same relation to the
living oracles of God as sophistic scholasticism to Scriptural
theology, and Jesuitical casuistry to Christian ethics. The Rabbis
spent all their energies in "fencing" the law so as to make it
inaccessible. They analyzed it to death. They surrounded it with so
many hair-splitting distinctions and refinements that the people could
not see the forest for the trees or the roof for the tiles, and mistook
the shell for the kernel.199199 The Rabbinical scholasticism
reminds one of the admirable description of logic in
Goethe’s Faust: "Wer will was Lebendig’s erkennen und
beschreiben,Sucht erst den Geist
hinauszutreiben;Dann hat er die
Theile in seiner Hand,Fehlt leider! nur
das geistige Band." Thus they made void the Word of God by the
traditions of men.200200Matt. 15:2, 3, 6; Mark 7:3, 5,
8, 9, 13. It is significant that Christ uses the word παράδοσιςalways in a bad sense of such human doctrines and usages
as obscure and virtually set aside the sacred Scriptures. Precisely the
same charge was applied by the Reformers to the doctrines of the monks
and schoolmen of their day. A slavish formalism and mechanical ritualism
was substituted for spiritual piety, an ostentatious sanctimoniousness
for holiness of character, scrupulous casuistry for genuine morality,
the killing letter for the life-giving spirit, and the temple of God
was turned into a house of merchandise.

The profanation and perversion of the spiritual
into the carnal, and of the inward into the outward, invaded even the
holy of holies of the religion of Israel, the Messianic promises and
hopes which run like a golden thread from the protevangelium in
paradise lost to the voice of John the Baptist pointing to the Lamb of
God. The idea of a spiritual Messiah who should crush the
serpent’s head and redeem Israel from the bondage of
sin, was changed into the conception of a political deliverer who
should re-establish the throne of David in Jerusalem, and from that
centre rule over the Gentiles to the ends of the earth. The Jews of
that time could not separate David’s Son, as they
called the Messiah, from David’s sword, sceptre and
crown. Even the apostles were affected by this false notion, and hoped
to secure the chief places of honor in that great revolution; hence
they could not understand the Master when he spoke to them of his,
approaching passion and death.201201Matt. 16:21-23; Mark 8:31-33;
Luke 9:22, 44, 45; 18:34; 24:21 John 12:34.

The state of public opinion concerning the
Messianic expectations as set forth in the Gospels is fully confirmed
by the preceding and contemporary Jewish literature, as the Sibylline
Books (about b.c. 140), the remarkable Book of
Enoch (of uncertain date, probably from b.c.
130–30), the Psalter of Solomon (b.c. 63–48), the Assumption of Moses,
Philo and Josephus, the Apocalypse of Baruch, and the Fourth Book of
Esdras.202202 See, of older works,
Schöttgen, Horae Hebraicae et
Talmudicae tom. II. (De
Messia), of modern works, Schürer, l.c.
pp. 563-599, with the literature there quoted; also James Drummond,
The Jewish Messiah,Lond. 1877. In all of them the Messianic kingdom, or the
kingdom of God, is represented as an earthly paradise of the Jews, as a
kingdom of this world, with Jerusalem for its capital. It was this
popular idol of a pseudo-Messiah with which Satan tempted Jesus in the
wilderness, when he showed him all the kingdoms of the world; well
knowing that if he could convert him to this carnal creed, and induce
him to abuse his miraculous power for selfish gratification, vain
ostentation, and secular ambition, he would most effectually defeat the
scheme of redemption. The same political aspiration was a powerful
lever of the rebellion against the Roman yoke which terminated in the
destruction of Jerusalem, and it revived again in the rebellion of
Bar-Cocheba only to end in a similar disaster.

Such was the Jewish religion at the time of
Christ. He was the only teacher in Israel who saw through the
hypocritical mask to the rotten heart. None of the great Rabbis, no
Hillel, no Shammai, no Gamaliel attempted or even conceived of a
reformation; on the contrary, they heaped tradition upon tradition and
accumulated the talmudic rubbish of twelve large folios and 2947
leaves, which represents the anti-Christian petrifaction of Judaism;
while the four Gospels have regenerated humanity and are the life and
the light of the civilized world to this day.

Jesus, while moving within the outward forms of
the Jewish religion of his age, was far above it and revealed a new
world of ideas. He, too, honored the law of God, but by unfolding its
deepest spiritual meaning and fulfilling it in precept and example.
Himself a Rabbi, he taught as one having direct authority from God, and
not as the scribes. How he arraigned those hypocrites seated on
Moses’ seat, those blind leaders of the blind, who lay
heavy burdens on men’s shoulders without touching them
with their finger; who shut the kingdom of heaven against men, and will
not enter themselves; who tithe the mint and the anise and the cumin,
and leave undone the weightier matters of the law, justice and mercy
and faith; who strain out the gnat and swallow the camel; who are like
unto whited sepulchres which outwardly appear beautiful indeed, but
inwardly are full of dead men’s bones, and of all
uncleanness. But while he thus stung the pride of the leaders, he
cheered and elevated the humble and lowly. He blessed little children,
he encouraged the poor, he invited the weary, he fed the hungry he
healed the sick, he converted publicans and sinners, and laid the
foundation strong and deep, in God’s eternal love, for
a new society and a new humanity. It was one of the sublimest as well
as loveliest moments in the life of Jesus when the disciples asked him,
Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven? and when he called a
little child, set him in the midst of them and said, "Verily I say unto
you, Except ye be converted and become as little children, ye shall in
no wise enter into the kingdom of heaven. Whosoever therefore shall
humble himself as this little child, the same is greatest in the
kingdom of heaven. And whoso shall receive one such little child in my
name receiveth me."203203Matt. 18:1-6; comp. Mark
10:13-16; Luke 18:15-17. And that other moment when he thanked his
heavenly Father for revealing unto babes the things of the kingdom
which were hid from the wise, and invited all that labor and are heavy
laden to come to him for rest.204204Matt. 11:25-30. This passage,
which is found only in Matthew and (in part) in Luke 10:21, 22, is
equal to any passage in John. It is a genuine echo of this word when
Schiller sings: "Was kein Verstand der Verständigen
sieht,Das
übet in Einfalt ein kindlich
Gemüth."

He knew from the beginning that he was the Messiah
of God and the King of Israel. This consciousness reached its maturity
at his baptism when he received the Holy Spirit without measure.205205John 1:32-34; comp.
3:34. To
this conviction he clung unwaveringly, even in those dark hours of the
apparent failure of his cause, after Judas had betrayed him, after
Peter, the confessor and rock-apostle, had denied him, and everybody
had forsaken him. He solemnly affirmed his Messiahship before the
tribunal of the Jewish highpriest; he assured the heathen
representative of the Roman empire that he was a king, though not of
this world, and when hanging on the cross he assigned to the dying
robber a place in his kingdom.206206Matt. 26:64; John l8:37;
Luke23:43. But before that time and in the days of
his greatest popularity he carefully avoided every publication and
demonstration which might have encouraged the prevailing idea of a
political Messiah and an uprising of the people. He chose for himself
the humblest of the Messianic titles which represents his condescension
to our common lot, while at the same time it implies his unique
position as the representative head of the human family, as the ideal,
the perfect, the universal, the archetypal Man. He calls himself
habitually "the Son of Man" who "hath not where to lay his head," who
"came not to be ministered unto but to minister and to give his life a
ransom for many," who "hath power to forgive sins," who "came to seek
and to save that which was lost."207207Luke 9:58; 19:10; Matt. 18:11;
20:17, 28; Mark 2:10, 28; John 1:51; 6:53, and many other passages. The
term ὁ
υἱός τοῦ
ἀνθρώπου
occurs about 80 times in the Gospels. On its meaning
comp. my book on the Person of Christ, pp. 83 sqq. (ed. of
1880). When Peter made the great
confession at Caesarea Philippi, Christ accepted it, but immediately
warned him of his approaching passion and death, from which the
disciple shrunk in dismay.208208Matt 16:20-23; Mark 8:30-33;
Luke 9:21-27. And with the certain expectation of his
crucifixion, but also of his triumphant resurrection on the third day,
he entered in calm and sublime fortitude on his last journey to
Jerusalem which "killeth the prophets," and nailed him to the cross as
a false Messiah and blasphemer. But in the infinite wisdom and mercy of
God the greatest crime in history was turned into the greatest blessing
to mankind.

We must conclude then that the life and work of
Christ, while admirably adapted to the condition and wants of his age
and people, and receiving illustration and confirmation from his
environment, cannot be explained from any contemporary or preceding
intellectual or moral resources. He learned nothing from human
teachers. His wisdom was not of this world. He needed no visions and
revelations like the prophets and apostles. He came directly from his
great Father in heaven, and when he spoke of heaven he spoke of his
familiar home. He spoke from the fullness of God dwelling in him. And
his words were verified by deeds. Example is stronger than precept. The
wisest sayings remain powerless until they are incarnate in a living
person. It is the life which is the light of men. In purity of doctrine
and holiness of character combined in perfect harmony, Jesus stands
alone, unapproached and unapproachable. He breathed a fresh life from
heaven into his and all subsequent ages. He is the author of a new
moral creation.

Hillel and Shammai are the most distinguished
among the Jewish Rabbis. They were contemporary founders of two rival
schools of rabbinical theology (as Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus of
two schools of scholastic theology). It is strange that Josephus does
not mention them, unless he refers to them under the Hellenized names
of Sameas and Pollion; but these names agree better with
Shemaja and Abtalion, two celebrated Pharisees and
teachers of Hillel and Shammai; moreover he designates Sameas as a
disciple of Pollion. (See Ewald, v. 22–26;
Schürer, p. 455). The Talmudic tradition has obscured their
history and embellished it with many fables.

Hillel I. or the Great
was a descendant of the royal family of David, and born at Babylon. He
removed to Jerusalem in great poverty, and died about a.d. 10. He is said to have lived 120 years, like Moses,
40 years without learning, 40 years as a student, 40 years as a
teacher. He was the grandfather of the wise Gamaliel in whose family
the presidency of the Sanhedrin was hereditary for several generations.
By his burning zeal for knowledge, and his pure, gentle and amiable
character, he attained the highest renown. He is said to have
understood all languages, even the unknown tongues of mountains, hills,
valleys, trees, wild and tame beasts, and demons. He was called "the
gentle, the holy, the scholar of Ezra." There was a proverb: "Man
should be always as meek as Hillel, and not quick-tempered as Shammai."
He differed from Rabbi Shammai by a milder interpretation of the law,
but on some points, as the mighty question whether it was right or
wrong to eat an egg laid on a Sabbath day, he took the more rigid view.
A talmudic tract is called Beza, The Egg, after this famous
dispute. What a distance from him who said: "The Sabbath was made for
man, and not man for the Sabbath: so then the Son of Man is Lord even
of the Sabbath."

Many wise sayings, though partly obscure and of
doubtful interpretation, are attributed to Hillel in the tract Pirke
Aboth (which is embodied in the Mishna and enumerates, in ch. 1, the
pillars of the legal traditions from Moses down to the destruction of
Jerusalem). The following are the best:

"Be a disciple of Aaron, peace-loving and
peace-making; love men, and draw them to the law."

"Whoever abuses a good name (or, is ambitious of
aggrandizing his name) destroys it."

"Whoever does not increase his knowledge
diminishes it."

"Separate not thyself from the congregation, and
have no confidence in thyself till the day of thy death."

"If I do not care for my soul, who will do it for
me? If I care only for my own soul, what am I? If not now, when
then?"

"Judge not thy neighbor till thou art in his
situation."

"Say not, I will repent when I have leisure, lest
that leisure should never be thine."

"The passionate man will never be a teacher."

"In the place where there is not a man, be thou a
man."

Yet his haughty Pharisaism is clearly seen in this
utterance: "No uneducated man easily avoids sin; no common person is
pious." The enemies of Christ in the Sanhedrin said the same (John
7:49): "This multitude that knoweth not the law are accursed." Some of
his teachings are of doubtful morality, e.g. his decision that, in view
of a vague expression in Deut. 24:1, a man might put away his wife
"even if she cooked his dinner badly." This is, however, softened down
by modern Rabbis so as to mean: "if she brings discredit on his
home."

Once a heathen came to Rabbi Shammai and promised
to become a proselyte if he could teach him the whole law while he
stood on one leg. Shammai got angry and drove him away with a stick.
The heathen went with the same request to Rabbi Hillel, who never lost
his temper, received him courteously and gave him, while standing on
one leg, the following effective answer:

Do not to thy neighbor what is disagreeable to
thee. This is the whole Law; all the rest is commentary: go and do
that." (See Delitzsch, p. 17; Ewald, V. 31, Comp. IV. 270).

This is the wisest word of Hillel and the chief
ground of a comparison with Jesus. But

1. It is only the negative expression of the
positive precept of the gospel, "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as
thyself," and of the golden rule, "All things whatsoever ye would that
men should do to you, even so do ye also to them"(Matt. 7:12; Luke
6:31). There is a great difference between not doing any harm, and
doing good. The former is consistent with selfishness and every sin
which does not injure our neighbor. The Saviour, by presenting
God’s benevolence (Matt. 7:11) as the guide of duty,
directs us to do to our neighbor all the good we can, and he himself
set the highest example of self-denying love by sacrificing his life
for sinners.

2. It is disconnected from the greater law of
supreme love to God, without which true love to our neighbor is
impossible. "On these two commandments," combined and
inseparable, hang all the law and the prophets" (Matt.
22:37–40).

3. Similar sayings are found long before
Hillel, not only in the Pentateuch and the Book of Tobith 4:15: (ὃ μισεῖς
μηδενὶ
ποιήσῃς, "Do that to no man which thou
hatest"), but substantially even among the heathen (Confucius, Buddha,
Herodotus, Isocrates, Seneca, Quintilian), but always either in the
negative form, or with reference to a particular case or class; e.g.
Isocrates, Ad Demonic.
c. 4: "Be such towards your parents as thou shalt pray thy
children shall be towards thyself;" and the same In Aeginet. c. 23: "That you would be such judges to
me as you would desire to obtain for yourselves." See Wetstein on Matt.
7:12 (Nov. Test. I. 341 sq.). Parallels to this and other
biblical maxims have been gathered in considerable number from the
Talmud and the classics by Lightfoot, Grotius, Wetstein, Deutsch,
Spiess, Ramage; but what are they all compared with the Sermon on the
Mount? Moreover, si duo idem dicunt, non est idem. As to the rabbinical parallels,
we must remember that they were not committed to writing before the
second century, and that, Delitzsch says
(Ein Tag in Capernaum, p. 137), "not a
few sayings of Christ, circulated by Jewish Christians, reappeared
anonymously or under false names in the Talmuds and Midrashim."

4. No amount of detached words of wisdom
constitute an organic system of ethics any, more than a heap of marble
blocks constitute a palace or temple; and the best system of ethics is
unable to produce a holy life, and is worthless without it.

We may admit without hesitation that Hillel was
"the greatest and best of all Pharisees" (Ewald), but he was far inferior to John the Baptist; and
to compare him with Christ is sheer blindness or folly. Ewald calls
such comparison "utterly perverse" (grundverkehrt, v. 48). Farrar
remarks that the distance between Hillel and Jesus is "a distance
absolutely immeasurable, and the resemblance of his teaching to that of
Jesus is the resemblance of a glow-worm to the sun" (II. 455). "The
fundamental tendencies of both," says Delitzsch (p. 23), "are as widely
apart as he and earth. That of Hillel is legalistic, casuistic, and
nationally contracted; that of Jesus is universally religious, moral
and human. Hillel lives and moves in the externals, Jesus in the spirit
of the law." He was not even a reformer, as Geiger and Friedlander
would make him, for what they adduce as proofs are mere trifles of
interpretation, and involve no new principle or idea.

Viewed as a mere human teacher, the absolute
originality of Jesus consists in this, "that his words have touched the
hearts of all men in all ages, and have regenerated the moral life of
the world" (Farrar, II. 454). But Jesus is far more than a Rabbi, more
than a sage and saint more than a reformer, more than a benefactor; he
is the author of the true religion, the prophet, priest and king, the
renovator, the Saviour of men, the founder of a spiritual kingdom as
vast as the race and as long as eternity.

163 The average length of Palestine
is 150 miles, the average breadth east and west of the Jordan to the
Mediterranean, from 80 to 90 miles, the number of square miles from
12,000 to 13,000. The State of Maryland has 11,124, Switzerland 15,992,
Scotland 30,695 English square miles.

164 The tradition, which locates
the Temptation on the barren and dreary mount Quarantania, a few miles
northwest of Jericho, is of late date. Paul also probably went, after
his conversion, as far as Mount Sinai during the three years of repose
and preparation "in Arabia,"Gal. 1:17, comp. 4:24.

165 W. Hepworth Dixon (The Holy
Land, ch. 14) ingeniously pleads for the traditional cave, and the
identity of the inn of the Nativity with the patrimony of Boaz and the
home of David.

166 We add the vivid description of
Renan (Vie de Jésus, Ch. II. p. 25) from personal
observation: "Nazareth was a small town, situated in a fold of land
broadly open at the summit of the group of mountains which closes on
the north the plain of Esdraëlon. The population is now from
three to four [probably five to six] thousand, and it cannot have
changed very much. It is quite cold in winter and the climate is very
healthy. The town, like all the Jewish villages of the time, was a mass
of dwellings built without style, and must have presented the same poor
and uninteresting appearance as the villages in Semitic countries. The
houses, from all that appears, did not differ much from those cubes of
stone, without interior or exterior elegance, which now cover the
richest portion of the Lebanon, and which, in the midst of vines and
fig-trees, are nevertheless very pleasant. The environs, moreover, are
charming, and no place in the world was so well adapted to dreams of
absolute happiness (nul endroit
du monde ne fut si bien fait pour les rêves de
l’absolu bonheur). Even
in our days, Nazareth is a delightful sojourn, the only place perhaps
in Palestine where the soul feels a little relieved of the burden which
weighs upon it in the midst of this unequalled desolation. The people
are friendly and good-natured; the gardens are fresh and green.
Antonius Martyr, at the end of the sixth century, draws an enchanting
picture of the fertility of the environs, which he compares to
paradise. Some valleys on the western side fully justify his
description. The fountain about which the life and gayety of the little
town formerly centered, has been destroyed; its broken channels now
give but a turbid water. But the beauty of the women who gathered there
at night, this beauty which was already remarked in the sixth century,
and in which was seen the gift of the Virgin Mary, has been
surprisingly well preserved. It is the Syrian type in all its
languishing grace. There is no doubt that Mary was there nearly every
day and took her place, with her urn upon her shoulder, in the same
line with her unremembered countrywomen. Antonius Martyr remarks that
the Jewish women, elsewhere disdainful to Christians, are here full of
affability. Even at this day religious animosities are less intense at
Nazareth than elsewhere." Comp. also the more elaborate description in
Keim, I. 318 sqq., and Tobler’s monograph on Nazareth,
Berlin, 1868.

167 Josephus no doubt greatly
exaggerates when he states that there were no less than two hundred and
four towns and villages in Galilee (Vita, c. 45, διακόσιαι
καὶ
τέσσαρες
κατὰ τὴν
Γαλιλαίαν
εἰσὶ
πόλεις καὶ
κῶμαι), and
that the smallest of those villages contained above fifteen thousand
inhabitants (Bell. Jud. III. 3, 2). This would give us a
population of over three millions for that province alone, while the
present population of all Palestine and Syria scarcely amounts to two
millions, or forty persons to the square mile (according to
Bädeker, Pal. and Syria, 1876, p. 86).

169 Comp. Fr. Delitzsch:
Ein Tag in Capernaum, 2d ed. 1873; Furrer: Die Ortschaften am See Genezareth,
in the "Zeitschrift des deutschen Palaestina-Vereins," 1879, pp. 52
sqq.: my article on Capernaum, ibid. 1878, pp. 216 sqq. and in
the "Quarterly Statement of the Palestine Exploration Fund" for July,
1879, pp. 131 sqq., with the observations thereon by Lieut. Kitchener,
who agrees with Dr. Robinson in locating Capernaum Khan Minyeh,
although there are no ruins there at all to be compared with those of
Tell Hum.

170 The present mongrel population
of Jerusalem—Moslems, Jews, and Christians of all
denominations, though mostly Greek—scarcely exceeds
30,000, while at the time of Christ it must have exceeded 100,000, even
if we make a large deduction from the figures of Josephus, who states
that on a Passover under the governorship of Cestius Gallus 256,500
paschal lambs were slain, and that at the destruction of the City,
a.d. 70, 1,100,000 Jews perished and 97,000
were sold into slavery (including 600,000 strangers who had crowded
into the doomed city). Bell. Jud. vi. 9, 3.

178 Josephus, Bell. Jud.
III. c. 3, § 2: "These two Galilees, of so great largeness,
and encompassed with so many nations of foreigners, have been always
able to make a strong resistance on all occasions of war; for the
Galileans are inured to war from their infancy, and have been always
very numerous; nor hath the country ever been destitute of men of
courage, or wanted a numerous set of them: for their soil is
universally rich and fruitful, and full of the plantations of trees of
all sorts, insomuch that it invites the most slothful to take pains in
its cultivation by its fruitfulness: accordingly it is all cultivated
by its inhabitants, and no part of it lies idle. Moreover, the cities
lie here very thick, and the very many villages there are so full of
people, by richness of their soil, that the very least of them
contained above fifteen thousand inhabitants (?)."

179John 1:46;.7:52; Matt.
4:16. The Sanhedrists forgot in their blind passion that Jonah
was from Galilee. After the fall of Jerusalem Tiberias became the
headquarters of Hebrew learning and the birthplace of the
Talmud.

180ῥαββί from ברַ or with the
suff יבִּרַ My
prince, lord, κὐριος) sixteen times in the N. T.,. ῥαββονί
orῥαββουνί
twice; διδάσκαλος
(variously rendered in the E. V. teacher,
doctor, and mostly master) about forty times; ἐπιστάτης(rendered master) six times, καθηγητής
(rendered master) once in Matt. 23:10 (the
text rec. also 10:8, where διδάσκαλος
is the correct reading). Other designations of these
teachers in the N. T. are γραμματεῖς
, νομικοί,
νομοδιδάσκαλοι. Josephus calls them σοφισταί,
ἱερογραμματεῖς,
πατρίων
ἐξηγηταὶ
νόμων–ϊ,
–ͅϊthe Mishna
סימִכחֲ and סירִפְוֹסscholars. See
Schürer, p. 441.

182 The same, however, was the case
with Greek and Roman teachers before Vespasian, who was the first to
introduce a regular salary. I was told in Cairo that the professors of
the great Mohammedan University likewise teach gratuitously.

183Ecclesiasticus 38:24-34: "The
wisdom of a learned man cometh by opportunity of leisure; and he that
hath little business shall become wise. How can he get wisdom that
holdeth the plough," etc.

184 See FR. Delitzsch:
Jüdisches Handwerkerleben zur
Zeit Jesu. Erlangen, third ed. revised,
1879. He states (p. 77) that more than one hundred Rabbis who figure in
the Talmud carried on a trade and were known by it, as R. Oshaja the
shoemaker, R. Abba the tailor, R. Juda the baker, R. Abba Josef the
architect, R. Chana the banker, R. Abba Shaul the grave-digger, R. Abba
Oshaja the fuller, R. Abin the carpenter, etc. He remarks (p. 23): "The
Jews have always been an industrious people and behind no other in
impulse, ability and inventiveness for restless activity; agriculture
and trade were their chief occupations before the dissolution of their
political independence; only in consequence of their dispersion and the
contraction of their energies have they become a people of sharpers and
peddlers and taken the place of the old Phoenicians." But the talent
and disposition for sharp bargains was inherited from their father
Jacob, and turned the temple of God into "a house of merchandise."
Christ charges the Pharisees with avarice which led them to "devour
widows’ houses." Comp. Matt. 23:14; Mark 12:40; Luke
16:14; 20:47.

186Luke 8:3 Matt. 27:55; Mark
15:41; John 13:29. Among the pious women who ministered to Jesus was
also Joanna, the wife of Chuzas, King Herod’s steward.
To her may be traced the vivid circumstantial description of the
dancing scene at Herod’s feast and the execution of
John the Baptist, Mark 6:14-29.

191 Josephus often speaks of this.
C. Ap. I. 12: "More than all we are concerned for the education
of our youth (παιδοτροφία), and we consider the keeping of the laws (τὸ
φυλάττειν
τοὺς
νόμους)
and the corresponding piety (τὴν κατὰ
τούτους
παραδεδομένην
εὐσέβειαν) to be the most necessary work of life."Comp. II. 18;
Ant. IV. 8, 12. To the same effect is the testimony of Philo,
Legat. ad Cajum. § 16. 31, quoted by
Schürer, p. 467.

195Acts 6:9 for the freedmen and
the Hellenists and proselytes from different countries. Rabbinical
writers estimate the number of synagogues in Jerusalem as high as 480
(i.e. 4 x 10 x 12), which seems incredible.

200Matt. 15:2, 3, 6; Mark 7:3, 5,
8, 9, 13. It is significant that Christ uses the word παράδοσιςalways in a bad sense of such human doctrines and usages
as obscure and virtually set aside the sacred Scriptures. Precisely the
same charge was applied by the Reformers to the doctrines of the monks
and schoolmen of their day.

204Matt. 11:25-30. This passage,
which is found only in Matthew and (in part) in Luke 10:21, 22, is
equal to any passage in John. It is a genuine echo of this word when
Schiller sings: "Was kein Verstand der Verständigen
sieht,Das
übet in Einfalt ein kindlich
Gemüth."

207Luke 9:58; 19:10; Matt. 18:11;
20:17, 28; Mark 2:10, 28; John 1:51; 6:53, and many other passages. The
term ὁ
υἱός τοῦ
ἀνθρώπου
occurs about 80 times in the Gospels. On its meaning
comp. my book on the Person of Christ, pp. 83 sqq. (ed. of
1880).